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The purpose of this paper was to gain a qualitative view of the participant experience of using home-based transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Acceptability impacts patient preference, treatment adherence and outcomes. However, acceptability is usually assessed by rates of attrition, while multifaceted constructs are not reflected or given meaningful interpretations. tDCS is a novel non-invasive brain stimulation that is a potential treatment for major depressive disorder (MDD). Most studies have provided tDCS in a research centre. As tDCS is portable, the authors developed a home-based treatment protocol that was associated with clinical improvements that were maintained in the long term.

The authors examined the acceptability of home-based tDCS treatment in MDD through questionnaires and individual interviews at three timepoints: baseline, at a six-week course of treatment, and at six-month follow-up. Twenty-six participants (19 women) with MDD in a current depressive episode of at least moderate severity were enrolled. tDCS was provided in a bifrontal montage with real-time remote supervision by video conference at each session. A thematic analysis was conducted of the individual interviews.

Thematic analysis revealed four main themes: effectiveness, side effects, time commitment and support, feeling held and contained. The themes reflected the high acceptability of tDCS treatment, whereas the theme of feeling contained might be specific to this protocol.

Qualitative analysis methods and individual interviews generated novel insights into the acceptability of tDCS as a potential treatment for MDD. Feelings of containment might be specific to the present protocol, which consisted of real-time supervision at each session. Meaningful interpretation can provide context to a complex construct, which will aid in understanding and clinical applications.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight both the value and critiques of Erving Goffman’s conceptualization of stigma as well as the emotion work needed to learn the lessons it has to teach.

I use a personal narrative grounded in my experience as a member of the “wise” category (the mother of a young woman with cerebral palsy) and observations of the reactions of my disabled students as a vehicle for taking the reader inside the experience of the trials and tribulations of reading Goffman as a member of “marked” social categories and the more humanizing experience of reading Spencer Cahill’s work.

There remains much to be learned from reading Goffman’s Stigma. In many ways his work has set the stage for approaches to the study of disability that we are still discovering. Learning these lessons through is made difficult by the de-humanizing perspective Goffman brings to the work. He clearly locates himself and his readers in the category of “we the normals” who see the stigmatized as “not quite fully human.” For disabled students and scholars and their families, reading Goffman requires a good deal of emotion management. Reading Spencer Cahill’s work can help in that process. Goffman presents disabled students and scholars and their family members with confirmation of what we know to be true about our marked and not quite human status in the eyes of others and in the process gives us our “own.” Cahill helps us all see ourselves in the strangeness that is inside social life. There is great value in both.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how researcher positionality is reconfigured by internet use.

Drawing on recent ethnographic studies conducted in Australia and Canada, the paper considers here how participant agency is symbolically and materially enacted through technology use.

The use of information communication technologies by researchers, research participants and industry partners in online information searching, and the production and dissemination of text poses challenges to conventional assumptions of unequal power relations in research sites.

The paper explores methodological, theoretical and practical implications of being a Googled ethnographer whose life, work, professional activities and networks as represented online are available for public scrutiny.

The paper argues, taking inspiration from Sarah Pink's recent work, that the author's and others’ use of information and communication technologies implicates us in shared “entanglements” of responsibility within and beyond research sites. The importance of these entanglements for contemporary thinking about researcher positionality, research relationships and researched/researching subjectivities is also considered.

This chapter explores the process through which one's moral career proceeds as one acquires a physical disability later in life. The author, who acquired a disability later in life, explores Goffman's notion of “moral career” as a process constructed from one's experience with both physical access and social access to the environment in which everyday interaction takes place. Using the extant literature and his personal experience, the author argues that one's identity as a person with a disability is always in a state of evolution. Rather than stable and fixed, it is unstable, although the rate of change is quite variable.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between employee perceptions of unfair treatment of older workers and employee engagement.

In a sample of over 4,500 workers, ages 18-94, from a retail workforce across three regions of the USA, the authors examine the relationship between perceptions that older workers are less likely to be promoted and employee engagement, using multilevel mixed effects linear regression models. The authors also examine whether the relationship is different if older workers were seen as fit for promotion, and whether discrimination is: intentional (fit, but less likely to be promoted) or unintentional (unfit, and less likely to be promoted).

Results indicate that perceived discrimination is related to lower levels of employee engagement among workers of all ages. Findings also suggest that for older workers, there is a more negative relationship between unintentional discrimination and employee engagement, while for younger workers the relationship is more negative for intentional discrimination.

Age discrimination is a critical issue for managerial psychology. While the authors' study is limited to one organization, the idea of unintentional discrimination may make it easier for managers to recognize and challenge discriminatory attitudes and behaviors in less threatening ways.

As older workers of today may not exit the workforce in predictable ways, there is a need to understand potential barriers to continued work. Traditional measures of stereotypes and perceptions of older workers are used here for the first time to construe intentional and unintentional discrimination, which may be one such barrier.

Clift and Morrison (2011) report that weekly singing over eight months for people with enduring mental health issues led to clinically important reductions in mental distress. The purpose of this paper is to test the robustness of the earlier findings.

Four community singing groups for people with mental health issues ran weekly from November 2014 to the end of 2015. Evaluation place over a six-month period using two validated questionnaires: the short Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation (CORE-10) questionnaire, and the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS).

In all, 26 participants completed baseline and follow-up questionnaires. CORE-10 scores were significantly reduced, and WEMWBS scores significantly increased. Comparisons with the earlier study found a similar pattern of improvements on CORE items that are part of the “problems” sub-scale in the full CORE questionnaire. There was also evidence from both studies of participants showing clinically important improvements in CORE-10 scores.

The main limitations of the study are a small sample size and the lack of a randomised control group.

No attempts have been made previously to directly test the transferability of a singing for health model to a new geographical area and to evaluate outcomes using the same validated measure.